Mail production systems generally include high-speed printers used for volume printing, and may be capable of printing hundreds of pages of content per minute or more. A typical mail production system includes multiple continuous-form printing systems that mark paper or other printable media. When mail pieces are produced in high volume (e.g., when the mail pieces are account statements from a large bank or credit provider), it may be necessary to print batches of hundreds of thousands, if not millions of mail pieces on a regular basis. To handle such print batches, the batch may be split into print jobs, and each print job sent to one of multiple printing systems.
A print shop is often managed by a print server that distributes print jobs and records properties of the print jobs as the documents are prepared for delivery (e.g., when they were printed, who they were directed to, the address they were mailed to, etc.). Archiving the information for a large volume of documents (e.g., millions or tens of millions of documents) across numerous different print jobs remains problematic, because archiving such information in a single database results in the database becoming large, inefficient, and difficult to manage and replicate for backup purposes. For example, in addition to requiring large amounts of system memory and processing resources, a database with a large table of document properties increases the rate of contention issues and failed/hung queries which results in transaction delays, and also requires long delays for outages to restore the table with a backup. Therefore a need remains for mail production database solutions with enhanced archiving functionality.